Developmental Neuroscience and a New Paradigm for Community-Based Learning
By Nancy Michael (University of Notre Dame) and Frank Spesia (St. Joseph County Department of Health)
Introduction
The Neuroscience and Behavior (NSBH) major at the University of Notre Dame has spent the past seven years developing a community-based learning course that has inverted the traditional power dynamics between the University and the South Bend community. The Developmental Neuroscience course has led to an infusion of neuroscience knowledge into community organizations that has resulted in a more collaborative and trauma-informed community. The course supplies community organizations with expertise and resources related to the impact of chronic stress and early life adversity, and community partners are invited into the curriculum development and teaching process to ensure that the NSBH students produce work that addresses the realistic needs of community organizations. By creating spaces where community perspectives are the roadmap for student engagement, Developmental Neuroscience has become a reflection of the needs and strengths of the South Bend community.
Students in Developmental Neuroscience work as neuroscience experts in service to their site partners. There is no standardized project or process that the students follow. Instead, they are required to listen and learn from their community partners and share their neuroscience knowledge in ways that will further the goals of their partners and community. While "neuroscience" might imply something medical, the vast majority of community partners are outside of the healthcare sector, and none of the partnerships result in a project that is medical or clinical in nature. What makes these partnerships unique is their goal of mobilizing the evidence base of neuroscience towards the wellness and capacity of the community. Towards that goal, students generally partnered with direct service-providing organizations such as youth anti-violence programs, community centers, housing programs, public health departments, and youth mentorship programs. The professional diversity of site partners supports the general hypothesis of the Developmental Neuroscience program: neuroscience necessarily involves participation of every human. By gaining a deeper understanding of what every human nervous system expects of the people and world around it, we can all do a better job taking care of ourselves and others. Infusing context-specific neuroscience into everyday programming can benefit individuals, organizations, and entire communities.
Flexibility and deference to community leadership is a hallmark of the Developmental Neuroscience course. The universal theme across organizations that partner with this work is that they all see value in lending neuroscience literacy to their organizational capacity-building efforts. Based on organizational and community needs, the partner directs the "what" of the project. As such, the student work takes a variety of different forms, ranging from the development of organization-specific training modules and policy briefs, to creative instructional materials like short videos, classroom resources, and bedside reflection booklets. Regardless of the end product, the theory of change remains the same: the partner organization has a question or curiosity, the students listen to and learn about their partner organization and community, offering a developmental neuroscientific framework to meet partner needs, and partner organizations determine the direction, format and audience for the work. No one knows what these projects will look like at the start, but through iterative development, most projects result with a sustainable capacity-building resource that is owned by the community partner, and often shared to the larger community.
In just seven years, the NSBH major has exploded in popularity among Notre Dame undergraduates and the Developmental Neuroscience course has quadrupled in size. The number of community partners engaging directly with the CBL course has increased more than tenfold, from three to over thirty, and the newly accessible neuroscience knowledge and resources has rippled into a virtuous cycle of collaboration and shared visioning across South Bend organizations. Students have shared powerful testimonials describing how this collaborative, community-driven learning has changed how they think and learn, and community partners have benefitted from authentic, compassionate neuroscience expertise that addresses the systemic needs of their community.
Inclusion and Resource Sharing
Neuroscience and Behavior was a new major in the 2014-15 academic year - the first cross-college collaboration for academic programs between the College of Science and the College of Arts and Letters in the almost 175 year history of the University of Notre Dame. As a new major, the course of study gained a lot of attention. As a cross-college collaboration, it did not have traditional structures of support - which in the context of decolonizing higher education, has proven to be a tremendous asset in innovation.
The study of Neuroscience and Behavior rapidly became one of the most popular majors at the University and that level of growth was difficult for University structural organization and resources to keep pace with. The major had more students than traditional labs could accommodate, so what many might view as a barrier was actually an opportunity to explore student engagement beyond the traditional boundaries of the academy. In the fall of 2015, Developmental Neuroscience, the first neuroscience community-based learning course, was launched. Starting small with three partners and twelve students, over the last seven years, these community-university partnerships now support approximately fifty upper level neuroscience and behavior majors every year in experiential, justice-based learning.
Expanding access to this community-driven framework was not necessarily about increasing the number of participating students, but instead emphasized expanding community access to a neuroscientific knowledge base that is often inaccessible to the general public. Only 1% of people in OECD countries have a PhD in any field, and the number of Neuroscientists falls far below that threshold. Developmental Neuroscience has brought essential knowledge to the community that often remains cloistered in academia.
Community-based learning courses come with some risk of students “othering” site partners and community members; that they are there to "serve" or "save.” Safeguards against this pernicious saviorism are built into the design of the Developmental Neuroscience course through reflection assignments and class discussions. Regularly throughout the semester, students are required to submit written reflections for review by their professor detailing their emotional response to their community work. Class discussions routinely include participation from community partners and are focused on how to understand the history of our region and how this history informes the current context of health, access and (in)equity. Through reflection writing and class discussion, students are encouraged to wrestle with how their personal backgrounds inform how they 'come to the table' to engage, their perceptions of issues they see in the community, and how to respect and honor the individuals served by their partner sites. These discussions frame all of the work of the semester and have shown to be effective in keeping students oriented towards a reciprocal partnership based on mutual trust and learning.
Community-led, Participatory, and Collaborative Methods
Historically, the research culture of the academy incentivizes and rewards research-to-practice models, where the academic community develops a new discovery or innovation based upon the field of research (Flaspohler et al, 2008). This research is generally funded by grant applications that require a priori aims, methods and hypothesized outcome. If the discovery or innovation is successful, the university may or may not seek a place or partnership to "implement" the discovery or innovation. A hammer seeking a nail in a manner of speaking. The community-driven evolution of the NSBH partnerships has allowed for a community-centered creation model to displace the more traditional research to practice model. Community members come with a curiosity, need or question, students bring the neuroscience, and community members direct how, where, in what format it's used and disseminated in ways that best meet the needs of the community.
The Director of Undergraduate Studies for Neuroscience and Behavior at the University of Notre Dame has worked closely with Beacon Health System and other community organizations to learn more about the state and needs of the region. Parallel to the evolution of the Developmental Neuroscience course in 2015, the largest health systems of our region, Beacon Health System, was grappling with evidence from their most recent Community Health Needs Assessments. The Assessment identified childhood abuse and trauma as the number two health concern, second only to obesity. It quickly became clear that the academic evidence of nervous system development, childhood adversity and life-long health could offer a framework through which the health system and community members could understand the root causes of some of the most pressing issues surrounding social correlates of health. This neuroscientific and collaborative framework positioned NSBH and the South Bend community to take action towards harm reduction and possibly even prevention. The academic and medical communities understand that 80% of an individual's health arises from factors outside their medical care. By mobilizing the evidence base of the academy through community-university partnership, we begin to create structures and create narratives in which all community members have a greater chance to be touched by healing.
Expansive Imagination and Possibility
The language of expansive imagination and possibility aligns with the nervous system’s expectations of healthy relationships and the world. Our biology benefits when we find ourselves in positive relationships with one another, that while we all might know that "adversity" is "bad," neuroscience offers the evidence base to understand that neutral is not innocuous. We have to take steps to heal the active wounds of individuals, and also the tacit wounds of the past. To give every human system the best chance at flourishing, we must move beyond reactive, fear-based outgrouping of those who are "different" and take intentional steps to recognize, articulate and heal structural and cultural wounds of the past. A "both-and" strategy that continues to require policy and legislation, and is also intentional to pivot the actions of individuals towards an interdependent perspective. As we all (students, partners and community members) learn about history and systemic structures that created our current state, these collaborations can turn to the obligate function and developmental principles of the nervous system to help us all heal and move forward. By deepening our understanding of how history is passed through our developing nervous systems across generations, every individual has an opportunity to gain awareness of how their own unique history can automatically and immediately shift their physiological state; we can feel threatened even when we are completely safe. As awareness of the normative processes of brain function is developed, so is the opportunity for choice in how one manages those reactions. With awareness and intention, we all gain the opportunity to choose to act in ways that develop opportunities for more peaceful, just, inclusive, and sustainable communities.
Structural Change
Strong community-based learning programs are rooted in reciprocity; that all participating entities should benefit from the partnership in ways that are relevant and meaningful for each party. With reciprocity in mind, any structural change must be evaluated by looking at the impact on students, the South Bend community, and the University. From a student perspective, the Developmental Neuroscience class has resulted in a formative change not only in how students view their career trajectories, but also how they articulate and act upon their responsibility to use the education in service to justice. Students are repeatedly struck by the realization that one can "do good" without becoming a doctor. Many neuroscience undergraduates begin their academic careers with little understanding of how their neuroscience knowledge can be applied beyond medical school, and even socially-conscious and justice-oriented students are often pushed implicitly towards the traditional pathways into medical school. Through participation in the community-based learning course, dozens of Neuroscience students have learned that there are practical and immediate applications of their neuroscience knowledge beyond medical training. This new cohort of social justice-oriented neuroscience majors is a thrilling look at how community based learning can be a force for social change.
From a community standpoint, the infusion of organization-centric neuroscience expertise has ignited a new wave of community collaboration that is rooted in neuroscience and the value of human connection. This is seen most tangibly in the formation of a community capacity-building movement called Self-Healing Communities of Greater Michiana. This community-capacity building model works in synergy across regional partners towards information dissemination, project sharing and organization and community strategy to redress historical exclusion. Dr. Nancy Michael is one of the key leaders of the movement locally, and serves on the Executive Committee. Her personal neuroscience expertise and the abilities of her undergraduate students have been essential to the development of resources and materials, and the promotion of the new community change model. Beyond Self-Healing Communities, the growing set of community partners that work with the undergraduate students has coalesced into a new network of professionals working to address systemic inequities in South Bend. The partner sites come from disparate professional sectors, but are united by their participation in the Developmental Neuroscience course. Their expertise has supported new sources of funding and unexpected collaborations between organizations that would otherwise have had little reason to connect with one another.
The Developmental Neuroscience course has set a new standard for community-based learning for the University of Notre Dame. The course has inspired a new curricular standard of justice as a principle embedded in a curricular arc, not an add on or elective. It has improved the way that community partners think about community-based learning, which in turn positions other academic departments to benefit from the renewed community enthusiasm for Notre Dame community-based learning classes. Finally, it has set an impressive example of how rigorous, “hard sciences” courses can engage with the community. By putting justice and equity at the center of the class structure, and ensuring that community partners are rightfully viewed as community experts, a new era of partnership and anti-racist learning is underway in South Bend, Indiana.
References
Flaspohler, P., Duffy, J., Wandersman, A., Stillman, L., & Maras, M. A. (2008). Unpacking prevention capacity: An intersection of research-to-practice models and community-centered models. American journal of community psychology, 41, 182-196.
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Nancy Michael serves as the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Neuroscience and Behavior major in the College of Science at the University of Notre Dame. She received her B.S. degree in Biomedical Science from Western Michigan University in 2001. After spending many years in the workforce, she returned to graduate study in 2008 and earned Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Minnesota in 2012. Professor Michael uses her disciplinary expertise to develop and implement NEAR (neuroscience, epigenetics, adverse childhood experiences, resilience) science approaches that aim to mitigate the impact of toxic stress on individuals and communities. Her work uses a community-based change theory model to work with community organizations in developing population specific NEAR-based strategies to support organizational and community efforts in becoming trauma-informed.
Frank Spesia began his career as an elementary school teacher, which showed him the myriad factors that impact child development, health, and education. His interest in the social, economic, and policy factors shaping his students’ lives led him to a career in public health where he currently serves as the Positive and Adverse Childhood Experiences (PACEs) Coordinator for his local health department. As the PACEs Coordinator, he works to develop programs and policies that will improve equitable access to health and education for all children and families, particularly those who have been harmed by traditional systems of government, education and healthcare. Frank is a cis-gender white man originally from Joliet, Illinois, he believes that integrity and empathy are essential leadership traits, and he works in his personal and professional life to build community and social connections that will yield a more just and equitable society.
Institutional Context: The University of Notre Dame is a Catholic University that has deep educational roots tying the practice and goals of education to principles of Catholic Social Tradition, like Solidarity, Encounter and Accompaniment. In addition, the University’s mission sets an aspirational standard in which the aim of the educational formation is to create a sense of human solidarity and concern for the common good that will bear fruit as learning becomes service to justice. We can not achieve this goal if education is kept within the confines of the classroom.
Snapshot Institutional Profile (for comparative purposes as part of the broader project described below, via National Center for Education Statistics IPEDS):
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This entry is part of a Public Writing Project, Higher Education for the World We Need, co-edited by Eric Hartman, Shorna Allred, Jackline Oluoch-Aridi, Marisol Morales, and Ariana Huberman. Initial reflections in that writing project will be posted here, on the blog of the Community-based Global Learning Collaborative (The Collaborative). The Collaborative is a multi-institutional community of practice, network, and movement hosted in the Haverford College Center for Peace and Global Citizenship. The Collaborative advances ethical, critical, aspirationally decolonial community-based learning and research for more just, inclusive, sustainable communities.
Save the date for, “Stepping into the Work: Expanding understanding of global positionality, responsibility, and opportunity,” a Collaborative gathering in partnership with the Global Engagement in the Liberal Arts Consortium at Haverford College, immediately outside of Philadelphia, November 10 and 11, 2023.